NFR - but why?!

[martinjuenke]

@Bones

The crappy bull shit world I was referring to, that you conveniently left out, had nothing to do with license transfers but in buying something that in all reality isn't really yours at all. As soon as the company goes out of business and your software still needs to be validated, if a reinstall is needed, your screwed. This has nothing to do with license transfers or a company's right to make money. If a company goes out of business, they obviously don't give a crap about making money anymore. I should still be able to use their software and not have to pray that my PC never crashes and that I never have to reinstall it. That's the bull shit I'm talking about. Years ago, you bought software, this was not a problem. You could reinstall it as many times as you needed even if the company went under.

But you conveniently left all this out in your condescending response to me calling me an entitled a-hole.

POPCORN!

[wagtunes]

@Bones

The crappy bull shit world I was referring to, that you conveniently left out, had nothing to do with license transfers but in buying something that in all reality isn't really yours at all. As soon as the company goes out of business and your software still needs to be validated, if a reinstall is needed, your screwed. This has nothing to do with license transfers or a company's right to make money. If a company goes out of business, they obviously don't give a crap about making money anymore. I should still be able to use their software and not have to pray that my PC never crashes and that I never have to reinstall it. That's the bull shit I'm talking about. Years ago, you bought software, this was not a problem. You could reinstall it as many times as you needed even if the company went under.

But you conveniently left all this out in your condescending response to me calling me an entitled a-hole.

POPCORN!

Seriously. Am I wrong?

[ShawnG]

Where did I imply there should be no rules?

anyone is entitled to demand whatever they wish... people are entitled to bitch if they want.

I also interpret that as meaning no one needs to consider the other side. Unfortunately, no companies with NFR policies are in this thread....

That's odd that you feel that way, because I made a balanced post which attempted to lay out both sides of the issue rationally, and you selectively quoted me to try to pin me to a point I wasn't making.

[Jace-BeOS]

@Bones

The crappy bull shit world I was referring to, that you conveniently left out, had nothing to do with license transfers but in buying something that in all reality isn't really yours at all. As soon as the company goes out of business and your software still needs to be validated, if a reinstall is needed, your screwed. This has nothing to do with license transfers or a company's right to make money. If a company goes out of business, they obviously don't give a crap about making money anymore. I should still be able to use their software and not have to pray that my PC never crashes and that I never have to reinstall it. That's the bull shit I'm talking about. Years ago, you bought software, this was not a problem. You could reinstall it as many times as you needed even if the company went under.

But you conveniently left all this out in your condescending response to me calling me an entitled a-hole.

POPCORN!

Seriously. Am I wrong?

Not from my perspective. BONES tends to flame and troll all over KVR without consequence. I read his "people who want to resell are assholes" as more of the same.

[Michael L]

Where did I imply there should be no rules?

anyone is entitled to demand whatever they wish... people are entitled to bitch if they want.

I also interpret that as meaning no one needs to consider the other side. Unfortunately, no companies with NFR policies are in this thread....

That's odd that you feel that way, because I made a balanced post which attempted to lay out both sides of the issue rationally, and you selectively quoted me to try to pin me to a point I wasn't making.

OK. No biggie.

[BONES]

This seems to have gone from a question of why companies don't allow transfer, to somehow an assertion that you are an entitled a-hole for selling anything, whether approved or not...

No, you have conflated two separate threads of the discussion. The entitled a-hole is the guy who thinks a dev should lose money so he can on-sell something he's finished with. It started with me asking a question about how much extra you might be willing to pay for a transferable license over a non-transferable one. But, as usual, people avoided answering the question and got all defensive about how they have all these rights, which seem to include developers doing what they want them to, regardless of what consequences that may have for the developer.

Or maybe people are just really bad at expressing themselves and can't make the point they want to make? Because it was quite a reasonable question based on a sound supposition (that a developer might use an NFR license to make their products cheaper than they'd be if the license was transferrable). I may have made a less sound assumption that people didn't want to answer that question because they were unable to put themselves in the other person's shoes for a moment and see both sides of the situation. But I really can't see any other reason not to at least acknowledge the possibility that there was some purpose behind it, can you?

Companies make money from this in the form of transfer fees, or simply in the fact that the new owner is likely to buy the next update/upgrade, and the original owner is not.

But they'd make more money if the new customer had to buy a new license, so they still lose out on the deal, which very likely means they have to factor that into their pricing. It's not unreasonable, is it?

Not to mention that NI allowing resale allows me to purchase products in between Komplete releases, and then sell them when the next Komplete rolls around, putting that money into the new bundle. If that was not there, NI's sales might dry up in the 18 month between bundle period....

And if they didn't allow transfers, maybe you wouldn't have to wait 18 months for the next bundle update because they could afford to hire more people? Or maybe not, who knows?

My point is that there could be any number of reasons for allowing or not allowing transfers and that, maybe, developers deserve the benefit of the doubt about their motivations. Certainly I think that making a purchasing decisioon based on stuff like that makes about as much sense as deciding which car to buy based on the size of the glovebox.

[BONES]

I allow license transfers, but the new license becomes NFR. The new user gets the software usually at a lower price, but loses the privilege of license transfer. It seems fair to me...

Just out of interersst, though, do you factor the cost of allowing that transfer into your prices? i.e. Do license transfers eat into your sales enough that you could lower your prices if you didn't allow them and still make the same money overall?

[BONES]

The crappy bull shit world I was referring to, that you conveniently left out, had nothing to do with license transfers but in buying something that in all reality isn't really yours at all.

Yes, that is the real world I was referring to.

As soon as the company goes out of business and your software still needs to be validated, if a reinstall is needed, your screwed.

But that's true of pretty much any product. e.g. My mate bought a ZuneHD in 2010 but Microsoft no longer support it. So a few weeks ago he needed to reset it, because it was playing up and corrupting files, but Microsoft no longer have the reset mechanism in place on their site, so by initialising the rest process he has effectively bricked it. And that company hasn't even gone out of business. Same for me - I'm still using Orion, even though it was discontinued a few years ago, and one day I'll get a new version of Windows that Orion won't install on any more. So what?

I've had worse with PSP - I bought MixSaturator a long, long time ago but for many years now they have only sold it as part of a bundle and they refuse point blank to support my single license any more. That's something to get pissed off about, a company going out of business is something to feel sorry about, not a time to be selfish.

This has nothing to do with license transfers or a company's right to make money. If a company goes out of business, they obviously don't give a crap about making money anymore. I should still be able to use their software and not have to pray that my PC never crashes and that I never have to reinstall it.

By that logic, it should still be incumbent upon Studebaker to supply parts of all their cars, even though they went out of business in 1967, so that people who bought them in the 1950s can keep driving them for as long as they want to. When a company goes out of business, all bets are off.

That's the bull shit I'm talking about. Years ago, you bought software, this was not a problem. You could reinstall it as many times as you needed even if the company went under.

So now you are saying that software developers should do nothing to combat piracy, just for your convenience? Because it is rampant piracy that has put us in this position, not the greed of software vendors.

But you conveniently left all this out in your condescending response to me calling me an entitled a-hole.

No, I quoted your post in full. It was just a single sentence, directed at me.

[martinjuenke]

What a pity, the sheer force of BONES silenced this philosophical thread...

[SMH]

He's right.

[martinjuenke]

BONES would say: GRRRRRRR!

[chk071]

POPCORN!

COP PRON?

[BONES]

What a pity, the sheer force of BONES silenced this philosophical thread...

No, what silenced this thread was the stupidity of those who are completely unable to see anything from any point of view other than their own. The mere thought that maybe NFR licenses keep prices lower for all of us was too much for these idiots to accept, because it would mean their hatred was ill-directed and they might have to feel bad about having done that. I put it up as a simple point of discussion and they went nuts on me for not seeing the world exactly as they do. It's pathetic.

[BBFG#]

Okay, so what proof is there that NFR licenses keep prices lower? Other than the companies telling us that?

And in discussing Kontakt on another thread, I wonder why they don't give us the option of locking it to that license so we're not stuck with them once we get rid of the engine it needs to run it anyway.

[Michael L]

Okay, so what proof is there that NFR licenses keep prices lower?

Just read through this thread.